Some Brisbane Guy

Today somebody sent me a link to MIS Australia’s article about some ridiculous filters the ever-paternalistic Australian government is trying to foist on the Australian public for our own protection. Like, thanks you guys.

Anyway I got feisty when I realised that you can’t cut and paste from the Australian Financial Review’s MISAustralia website. As soon as you highlight text on the site, it becomes all garbled. My first, knee-jerk reaction when somebody does something on their website to make it less useful for users (like disabling right-click) is along the lines of “Errr you MORONS! WHY would you BOTHER DOING THIS?” Which is not exactly constructive criticism, but I really can’t see how doing this kind of dumb stuff on your website is a good idea.

If you don’t want your content on the web, don’t publish it there!

I can somewhat understand the mindset of fear at work here. Site owners feel that their content is sitting out there on the web ready to be copied and exploited by anyone. But here are a bunch of reasons why it’s dumb to use lame “DRM” or “copy protection” methods on your website:

You’re making it HARDER for people to share your stuff with their friends

In my case with this article, a guy at work tried to send me the link and a relevant quote from the article — but couldn’t! He could only send me the link. If a busy person can’t just quickly cut and paste the written equivalent of a soundbite to somebody else, they might not bother at all — it’s annoying and confusing. Not only that, but I might not visit your site because it’s just a boring link - there’s no snippet to pique my interest. This means less traffic for your website.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s HARDER TO FIND

Having garbled content is bad for search engine rankings. Don’t believe me? Try this search — it’s searching for the phrase “opponents of isp-level filtering” on Google — but restricted to ONLY on the MIS Australia website. Whaddya know, it returns ZERO results! That’s because the “protected” content makes NO SENSE to search engines. Not being searchable means missing out on A LOT of potential search traffic.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s not SHARING INFORMATION - what the web is built on

The most successful websites actively share their content to attract more users/readers using something called RSS. What RSS does is lets you share your content so freely that computers can find new stuff on your site and do the job of spreading it around for you! The only way people are going to know that your site has great content is by showing it to them. Hiding your content away is going to help nobody — not readers, because they can’t find you, and not you, because you’ll have no readers.

I can appreciate that people may be fearful about their content being stolen by web scraping. But this is actually not that big of a problem. Google knows how to deal with web scraping and has methods of determining who should be rewarded as the original publisher of content. Some kid stealing your articles and posting them on his own site isn’t going to take away all of your traffic!

You’re making your website WORSE TO USE.

So many sites that prevent me from right-clicking an image make me angry, because usually I’m just trying to see a higher-resolution version of the picture that they’ve scaled down to fit their page using HTML, but the pic is really a big, colourful picture with lots of detail that I’m missing out on. That sucks. Or maybe I want to send the picture to a friend, saying “Hey, look at this great site, they have heaps more cool pics like this one!” — just saying “hey check out this site they have cool pics” is way less powerful.

And that’s just disabling right-click. MIS Australia’s effort actually makes the site look TERRIBLE -- they have to use a fixed width font because their lame content “DRM” just uses two layers of content, one beneath the other! If you used a variable-width font the text on the two layers would never line up, and you would just get a jumble of letters. So that’s why MIS Australia’s articles look like they were typed out in the 1940s, even on a beautiful screen with font smoothing.

Speaking of a jumble of letters, that’s also what any visually-impaired person’s screen reader is going to see when it tries to read out the page. Way to discriminate against the disabled, yeah!

Your lame system can be easily circumvented ANYWAY - so why bother?

Especially the sites that deny the ability to right-click. There’s so many ways around this that it’s just pointless and makes your site annoying. If you really don’t want people to steal your images, use low-resolution pics with a watermark, because your right-click prevention just won’t work. If you really don’t want people to steal your website code, the best you can do is to obfuscate it — or don’t publish it at all! Web programmers are crafty — and often still in high-school, so they have lots of time to work around your tricks!
In the case of the MIS Australia website, to get the text of any of their articles is as easy as using /g,’\n\n’).replace(/< [^>]*>/g,”));})();”>this link and choose “Bookmark this link” or “Add to Favorites” and save the link to your bookmarks/favorites.

Now read an article on MISAustralia.com and if you like it, click your bookmark/favorite you have just added.

Presto! The article contents will be pasted into the comments box at the bottom of the page for you to cut and paste at your leisure.

I’ll say it again. If you’re going to go to the trouble of putting your content on the web, why hamstring your efforts? Put it out there and SHARE IT, and more importantly, LET OTHER PEOPLE SHARE IT — that’s what your website is for, and that’s how you get popular!

Part of being an Australian means you need to accept that sometimes, an expression or offhand turn of phrase you hear a lot won’t make much sense if you think about it logically. That’s mostly OK because in my experience, people use phrases and clichés they don’t understand without thinking twice; the phrase takes on almost the status of a single word and has a generally understood meaning — and sometimes that’s just…enough, you know?

Here would be a good place to give my statement some solid reinforcement with a few concrete examples of such, but it’s late at night and this blog is hardly a showpiece of academia so I’ll leave the filling of the aforementioned gaps as an exercise for the reader. As you are a constituent of my readership I am certain that it is just to bestow upon you the qualities of resourcefulness, zeal for truth and thirst for knowledge so this burden will be of little imposition to you. And you could start here.

But, to carry on, the point of this post is to say that Guam (see #5) is quite close to me really, being only a few thousand kilometres away and not tens of thousands, like, say, Greece or England.

So what? Well it gets crazy when a conversation goes something like the following:

Me: Hey, what’s up? [obviously imagine me looking way cool at this point]
Other Person: Oh man I just went to a sporting event, it was neato.
Me: Oh yeah? Like, where was it?
Other Person: Dude it was in like, Guam! Took us an hour to get there.
Me: Gee I sure am suitably impressed. Way to go, casual acquaintance! See ya round hey.
Other Person: Ace! See ya.

You can see where the possible confusion could arise where this conversation takes place between two residents of Australia. Guam is being used here as a token to exemplify an exaggeratedly far away location to place special emphasis on the sporting event’s location being very distant. In a place such as the U.S.A. or the Isle of Mann this is fine and congruent with the speaker’s meaning, especially since Guam has indeed been a far-flung outpost of the United States since World War II with its U.S. military base bristling with weapons I imagine to be poised to cause the mass destruction of South East Asia.

N.B. All of the above text is to justify the images contained within this post.

First, some definitions:

jackass:

fathead: a man who is a stupid incompetent fool

jack: male donkey

ass:

the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on; “he deserves a good kick in the butt”; “are you going to sit on your fanny and do nothing?”

a pompous fool

hardy and sure-footed animal smaller and with longer ears than the horse

arse:

buttocks: the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on; “he deserves a good kick in the butt”; “are you going to sit on your fanny and do nothing?”

anus: excretory opening at the end of the alimentary canal

Heaps of Australians since the release of Jackass: The Movie and Jackass Number Two somehow can’t determine how to correctly pronounce the word “jackass”.

Cobbers, I’m gonna to tell you right here — it rhymes with “bass” as in “sea bass”! OK? It’s ass like donkey, not arse like buttocks.

There’s no flamin’ thing as a “Jackarse“! A jackass is a male donkey. If the movie were made by Australians, English, South Africans or some other nation that doesn’t do dumb stuff like drop “and” from numbers (one hundred thirty two? wtf) or very important letters (aluminum pronounced “aloomernerm” is pointless), it would still be called “Jackass”, unless it was called “Dickhead”, which is actually more likely. It wouldn’t be called “Jackarse” because there’s no such thing.

So you bloody drongos, I say don’t bring yourselves down to the level of the Amurr’kins with their innernit and aloomernum. Just because they’ve lost the distinction between “ass” (a donkey) and “arse” (buttocks/anus) doesn’t mean we have to.

Australia has a rich tapestry of insults and vulgar slang, let’s keep it that way. Ass and arse are different, jackass doesn’t sound like “jackarse” so next time you’re tempted, do it right. Have some balls, digger! You can do it!

OK, I’m going to weigh in on the great toilet seat debate.

“Oh my god! Does he say ‘up’ or ‘down’?” I hear you ask eagerly. Well, wrong on both counts kid, you’re missing the damn point.

The point is, you should be closing the lid of the toilet after you drop your guts into it, ’cause when you flush, little particles of poo and wee get splashed around your den of solitude. So stop arguing about whether the stupid seat should be up or down and close the lid!

So this makes the whole seat debate just really dumb and boring. Complaining that somebody left the toilet seat up when you need it down (or vice versa, but who complains when people leave it down?) is just banal and ridiculous. Here’s why:

1. It takes, like, 1 second to reverse the situation. Do you really need to save that single second of your time?
2. What makes you and your needs more important than the other person’s?
3. You need to have something more important to care about. Oh, here’s something you can try to get started: think about the toilet roll instead. Is the paper over or under? Now you’re tackling some serious issues. Don’t overdo it!

Well that’s all I have to say on this waste-of-time non-issue, now you will be well equipped to deal with any toilet seat without wetting yourself about whether it’s up or down. Don’t forget, after you finish put the lid down and wash your hands.

A few people have asked what awesome blog template I’m using at the moment, looking at me through green eyes filled with barely cloaked jealousy, typing with nervous fingers quivering with envy.

The answer is basic 1.0 — “a totally stripped down and basic Wordpress theme.”

I was sick of having problems with different browsers, and like a plumber with leaky taps, an electrician with children who see in the dark or a mechanic who catches the bus to work, I just don’t care. And this theme is easy to read — big text, plenty of whitespace, full width of your browser so you control how wide it is. This theme is all about you.

The thing is, you should be using an RSS reader if you read more than one blog more than once. Stop going back to sites to try and see if they have updates, let software tell you that!

So I might do some impatient editing of the theme so the menu is at least in your first screenful instead of at the bottom of the page, and maybe change to a decent font, but not yet.

The world is divided into two groups of people: the ones who care about grammar and spelling, and normal people. Sadly, I’m in the first group. I’m not a madman (except in the sack *growl*), but it grates on me whenever I read a sentence like:

I bought a kitten down from a tree its broken it’s leg in more then 3 places im definately sadder then one of those grammar nazi’s, whats your problem anyway freak’s? I’ll feed you capsicun!

No problem you say? WRONG! Read and weep you normal person with better things to care about:

1. The Apostrophe is the most common of all stuff-ups, based on my comprehensive guesswork. It’s really not a big deal, there are really only two rules and a single exception that I can think of:
   1. Put an apostrophe to replace missing letters if you were to use real actual words (eg. you’re (you are), don’t (do not), can’t (can not), isn’t (is not), aren’t (are not))
   2. Put an apostrophe when someone or something owns something else. Put it only after the owner of the thing. If the owner of the thing doesn’t have an “s” on the end, the “s” goes before the apostrophe! (eg. the puppy’s paws (a puppy owns some paws), woman’s thong (the woman owns the thong), women’s movement (note that the women own the movement, not the womens), the puppies’ mother (a bunch of puppies who own a mother).
   3. EXCEPTION! The word “its” doesn’t get an apostrophe when the “it” is the owner. Weird hey? But it’s because that would make “it’s” into a shortened “it is”, which DOES have an apostrophe. So if you’re using “it’s”, do you really mean “it is”? If not, ditch the apo’ like it ain’t no thang.

   So if it’s a plural (eg “you freaks”, “a million baboons”, “ten fat kids”), you DON’T need an apostrophe. EVER!

2. The then / than conundrum. OK I admit I don’t know how to solve this one; I don’t have any rules that will help you think through it logically like you can with apostrophes (except for “its” owning stuff…dammit). The only thing I can think of is that “than” ALWAYS means you’re comparing stuff (Better THAN Ezra, Bigger THAN Ben Hur, Larger THAN Life), so if you’re not comparing, you gotta use “then”.
3. Bought / brought. This one just takes a teensy bit of thinking. Bought is when you had to “buy” something, and brought is when you had to “bring” something. Therefore, you only “brought” it if you actually did “bring” it.
4. Definately. I’ve got nothing. “Definitely” is definitely spelled with “itely” not “ately”, just remember it. It never ate anything.
5. Capsicun. It’s capsicummmmmmmmmmmmmm!!! Errrrrrrr stop saying capsicunnnnnnnn oh lord it hurts! Capsicain is the chemical in chillis and peppers that stings your tongue, and is why you couldn’t see when the police sprayed pepper spray into your eyes.

So here’s our sentence from above, all fixed and readable:

I brought a kitten down from a tree, it’s broken its leg in more than three places. I’m definitely more sad than one of those grammar nazis, what’s your problem anyway freaks? I’ll feed you capsicum!

I fixed a couple of other tiny things that I won’t bother nitpicking here, if you can find them then you’re my hero no I really mean it email me with naked pictures of your nanna now, please.